GRADUATE ASSISTANT SPOTLIGHT Jennifer (Otis) Miller
Alice Gisler
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oth a ceramic artist and a doctoral student in the University of Iowa College of Education’s Language, Literacy, and Culture program, Jennifer Miller brings broad experience and interests to her work with the Stanley’s Learning and Engagement department. Her pilot video series for the Stanley YouTube channel, Unexpected Insights, highlights a single work from the collection and invites three people from the community with different perspectives to share personal reflections. These responses provide unique viewpoints on art and life in Iowa and beyond.
Miller found producing a purely digital project during a mostly digital work experience a challenge unlike her physical art Photo by Veronica Burns practice. Happily, she was able to make exciting connections and share the voices of people from the UI Center for the Book, her ceramics community, the food industry, and beyond. Miller hopes her model of community conversations will continue to serve the museum in the future and “make works of art more accessible to wider audiences.” Looking forward, she wants “to facilitate these kinds of conversations with [others]—communicating across differences and inviting people in.” Offering paid, pre-professional opportunities to UI students and encouraging diverse points of view are values embedded in the museum’s strategic plan. Not only do student employees gain skills and experiences that will serve them well in any field they pursue, but they also make valuable contributions to museum planning, programming, and thinking. 26
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orking for the museum is a “complete coincidence” says UI School of Library and Information Science graduate student Alice Gisler. “I was just hunting around for scholarships and this one crossed my desk.” She has been pushing herself for the last couple of years to try new things, branch out, and learn new skills. In her work with the Curatorial and Collections Management teams, Gisler is “doing what needs to be done,” which includes grant research, collections database entry, and editing images of inaugural exhibition objects in Adobe Photoshop. She compiled the properly scaled images into a library so Photo by Alice Gisler curators could easily locate objects by accession number and import them into the 3D modeling software SketchUp. Gisler has become so proficient in SketchUp that she completed a model of a teen/young adult area for a public library as part of her coursework. “I would not have been able to do that without the work I’ve done here at the Stanley. It’s been a wonderful opportunity.” With an anticipated May 2022 graduation, Gisler hopes to find “straight up public librarian work.” Her passion is focusing her work on LBGTQ+ youth and teens. Gisler wants to create a space where they can “get information, express themselves creatively, and feel like they can have ownership of themselves and their lives, and their place in the world.” S TANLEY M U S E U M O F A RT
